This Identity

Artist:

Yastika Prakash Shetty

Location:

Bangalore, India

Full Category:

Collectibles > Other Collectibles

Starting Price:

₹300

Sale Price:

Unsold

Artist Bio:

Yastika Prakash Shetty (1997) is an aspiring artist and designer from Mumbai, India, who is currently pursuing her Bachelor’s degree from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru . She has been a Bharatanatyama dancer since the age of 7 and theatre practices have had a lot of influence on her. Apart from performance arts, she is interested in the relationship between art and science, social sciences, world affairs, sustainable living, poetry, folklore and mythology, and how to balance them in her art practice. Yastika is also interested in the weirdness of life and enjoys exploring the theme of absurdity in art. She strongly believes in striving for change and not sticking with the convenient options of life.

Curator:

Marialaura Ghidini — Class Facilitator

Artist Statement:

We try to come to term with the question, ‘Who am I?’ throughout our lives, we try to prove ourselves different from others creating our distinct identity. However in our attempt to discover ourselves—a right no one should be able to take away from us—we are often stopped by social impositions, like the rules, behaviours and prejudices that are imposed on us. It seems there is always a person, a government or an organisation ‘in power’ trying to control our identities for their benefit by ‘simplifying them’

The introduction and digital implementation of the Aadhar card in India (Aadhar is an individual identification number issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) on behalf of the Government of India to individuals for the purpose of establishing the unique identity of every single person) took away our right to create our own identity, reducing it to a series of data housed on a national database. This had caused people being denied basic rice ration in Jharkhand as they could not present an Aadhar-linked authentication.

The government now has simplified and boiled our identities down to our biometric details. According to them this system could never make a mistake in identifying an individual registered under it. However, the truth is that this system has been responsible for successfully creating two individual identification numbers issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for one person. According to Sumandro Chattapadhyay, research director at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), “We are building a system that will decide whether a child will eat or not on an afternoon based on [the] quality of internet connectivity and cleanliness of the child’s thumbprint.” Have our identities been boiled down to digitized signs?

This Identity is my attempt to take back my right to identify myself in the way I want to be identified as. By offering this identity to a buyer I want it to become part of something larger by having someone to accept it and make it her/his. This might help me and the buyer to further discover our own identities.